Announcement and discussion of new and future features of the French Linguistics web site. Please feel free to comment on the entries. To ask a question about French, see forum.french-linguistics.co.uk

October 3, 2014

Update to Utter French! pronunciation guide

The "Sounds of French" tab in the Utter French!
pronunciation guide for iPhone. Today's fix means that all
three words in the list will be read out: even on
iOS 8!

An update to the Utter French! pronunciation guide was released to the app store today. This update fixes an issue caused by an apparent bug in iOS 8 that prevented the example words from the "Sounds" tab from playing back correctly. This tab contains a list of sample words as examples for each of the various sound classes or "phonemes" in French, and prior to the update, only the first word in each list would play back under iOS 8. (If you're thinking that this sounds like a slightly weird issue, programmers may like to check out the aforementioned article for the technical details of why this occurred!)

Apple is evidently busy with a large volume of updates to fix iOS 8 related issues given the number of updates that are being released to common apps every day and the extended time apparently required at the moment for app updates to be released.

As things settle down, look out for feature updates to Utter French! over the coming weeks. At present, the app focuses on audio and phonetic descriptions. An upcoming update will also include more information about how to read French words from the written form ("grapheme-phoneme correspondences" to use the spuriously posh-sounding linguistic term!).